Then something vital seemed to crack wide open inside her, stopping her breath and holding her pinned like a weighted piece of wood to the spot while her mind came to terms with what Rafe was doing here.
Making the jilter face the jilted.
And, from somewhere within the stunning tension holding all three of them captive, Shaan reacted. ‘Well, well,’ she drawled. ‘Both Danvers brothers. This is nice. All we need now is for Madeleine to appear and we can do a bit of bride-swapping.’
Piers flinched. ‘Don’t, Shaan,’ he mumbled uncomfortably.
Don’t? she thought furiously. So what would he prefer I do—fall into a fit of broken-hearted hysterics? ‘I don’t need this,’ she muttered, spinning back to the doorway.
But Rafe stood solidly in her way. ‘You’re staying,’ he insisted, using his hands on her shoulders to keep her there. ‘You said you couldn’t live a lie any longer, so we’re going to see if you can live any better with the truth.’
The truth?
‘Do you honestly think I’m about to believe a single thing Piers has to say?’ she demanded bitterly.
‘You will if he values his position in this family,’ Rafe stated grimly—and that was said for Piers’ benefit, not Shaan’s. ‘He knows why he’s here, and he knows what’s at stake here.’ His eyes, gone stone-grey with resolve, fixed on her own accusing ones. ‘So you stay,’ he repeated. ‘You listen. Then he goes and we talk.’
With that arrogant proclamation, Rafe unclipped his hands from her shoulders then turned and walked out of the room, firmly closing the door behind him.
And the new silence throbbed with a pulsing reluctance on both sides.
It was Piers who decided to break it. ‘I think the unspoken implication there was that I leave horizontally if I dare to upset you,’ he suggested drily.
It was an attempt on his part to make light of it all. But Shaan was in no mood for his unique brand of wit, as her icy expression told him when she turned round to face him.
He saw it and acknowledged it with a rueful little grimace. ‘Don’t find me funny any more, Shaan?’ he quizzed.
‘No,’ she replied ‘And neither do I have anything to say to you,’ she tagged on coolly.
‘I didn’t think you would.’ Another grimace. ‘But big brother insisted—or at least,’ he added, ‘he maintains that I have a lot to say to you.’
‘Well, I have no wish to hear it,’ she countered stiffly. ‘In fact, I’ll even make it easy for you, Piers, and tell you that you did me a favour walking out on me the way that you did.’
‘Because you got Rafe instead of me?’
Her chin came up. ‘I adore him,’ she declared with absolute honesty. ‘Within a week of being with him, I’d even forgotten what you looked like.’
He winced at that. ‘So, what’s new?’ he said, on a sigh that took with it every vestige of humour. ‘Rafe has been upstaging me all my life, so having you fall out of love with me to fall in love with him is no real surprise, Shaan. In fact,’ he added grimly, ‘I always expected it.’
‘What is that supposed to imply?’ She frowned, not following where he seemed to be leading.
‘Just what it said.’ And with a small shrug of his elegant shoulders he turned to walk over to the window. It was dark outside, so dark he surely couldn’t see much further than the paved terrace. Yet Piers managed to fix his gaze on something out there.
‘All my life I’ve been in competition with Rafe over something,’ he told her heavily. ‘When I was younger, I was competing for my father’s approval, to be an equally worthy son—the unattainable,’ he mocked, ‘since everyone including myself knew I could never be to him what good old Rafe was. His first-born.’ He said it drily. The big, tough, incredibly clever one. It was the same at school,’ he added, thrusting his hands into his trouser pockets, while Shaan quietly moved over to the nearest chair and lowered herself into it. She was interested in what he was saying—despite not wanting to be.
‘I attended the same schools where good old Rafe had been before me and left behind him the kind of legacy that was almost impossible to live up to—though I tried,’ he confessed, with yet more of that grim self-mockery. ‘I did at least try to compete with the damned legend—and failed again.’ He huffed out a gruff bark of laughter. ‘It was the same at work. Rafe Danvers the super-heavyweight versus Piers the lightweight…’
Shaan found herself beginning to feel just a little sorry for him, because he was right and she couldn’t even lie and say that he wasn’t. Piers was classed as the weaker, less effective brother. The easier one to be around because he didn’t strike awe into all who met him.
‘The only person,’ he went on, ‘I felt with an absolute certainty cared more for me than she did for my brother was Madeleine. She was mine.’ His voice was gruff with possession. ‘Had always been mine from the first moment we met each other at some silly teenage party at the age of fifteen. When Madeleine looked at me,’ he declared huskily, ‘she saw no one else. Not any other man but me. Mine!’ he repeated. ‘Yet, in the end, even Madeleine betrayed me with Rafe.’
Shaan’s heart squeezed with an aching empathy because, no matter what Piers had put her through, she could understand what that must have meant to him—simply because she knew how painful that particular betrayal felt.
‘Rafe would have nothing to do with her, of course.’ Her head shot up, eyes widening in disbelief on the back of Piers’ fair head. He must know—surely—that Rafe was in love with Madeleine?
Seemingly, he didn’t. ‘He just wouldn’t do that to me—though it’s taken me these last few months of Madeleine’s constant nagging to make me acknowledge that fact,’ he confessed, with no conception of what Shaan was thinking. ‘I’d become so used to blaming Rafe for every failure in my life, you see, that it just didn’t occur to me that really he was the only person who truly loved me. Truly cared about me and my feelings and would never betray me…’
Oh, I wish that were true, Shaan thought heavily. How she wished it were all true. For Piers’ sake.